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1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to providing movie producers and digital movie exhibitors a quick, efficient, ultra-secure process for high quality digital movie distribution to commercial theaters.
2. Background Art
The method and process of distributing movies to commercial exhibitors has remained unchanged for almost 80 years. The reason this system has existed for so long rests primarily upon the fact that commercial movie distributors and exhibitors relied upon the same photographic technology unchanged since Thomas Edison""s Kinetoscope. Movies are presently filmed onto celluloid photographic film stock and edited. The completed celluloid films are then distributed by reproducing thousands of copies of the edited celluloid film, placing the individual reels in heavy metal canisters and, under tight security, shipping the copies to the theaters for exhibition. The movies are then shown on a standard 35 mm commercial movie projector. Due to the size of commercial theater screens, no other process has even come close to the quality, sharpness and clarity of the image of the present celluloid projection system. Recently, however, several movie projectors have been developed using digital technology that has equaled or even surpassed the exhibition quality of the celluloid image on the large screen. These digital movie innovations have given way to ideas for innovative means of digital satellite movie distribution. The problem, however, is that many movie studios and producers do not wish to risk the millions of dollars it takes to produce the movie by transmitting the film on a satellite and inviting movie piracy. Several present encryption codes are already believed to have been broken. In all of the present encryption methods, the film is transmitted in its entirety as a type of puzzle waiting to be solved. Unfortunately, the rewards to movie pirates for solving such a puzzle are quite high while personal risks are low. The invention dramatically decreases a movie pirate""s potential reward while substantially increasing the movie pirate""s personal risk. First, if the pirate is successful in cracking the encryption code of the satellite feed, the best case scenario is possession of a fragmented soundless movie. If the enterprising pirate has the unlikely fortune to have also commandeered the Internet portion of the movie by breaking through the web security barriers and is additionally able to crack the second encryption code, the best case scenario for the thief is possession of two halves of a puzzle needing to be assembled.
A system and process for ultra-secure distribution of digital movies by bifurcating selected elements of the movie before encryption, dispatching the individual bifurcated elements via separate and unrelated electronic vehicles, decoding and reconstructing bifurcated elements at the final intended destinations for use in commercial digital movie exhibition.